


Hands of Mercy

by icarus_chained



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship/Love, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Panic, Protectiveness, field medicine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:34:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26990719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: There's no point wasting stimpacks on Nick. It's not like they'd even work on a Gen 2. Might as well stimpack a car or a cash register while you're at it. But a panicky Nora won't take no for an answer. And ... whether it's the stim, or it's her, maybe something works after all.
Relationships: Female Sole Survivor/Nick Valentine
Comments: 22
Kudos: 92





	Hands of Mercy

It started with a bullet.

Not so unusual, that. Nick guessed a lot of things in the Commonwealth started with bullets. Second only to the number of things that _ended_ with bullets. That part, at least, wasn’t odd.

The rest of it … That was a different story.

He got winged in a firefight. Of course he did. Some bright spark with the sniper rifle. 50 calibre, Jesus. It blew out his knee joint, metal or no metal, and dropped him on his ass with a spang! of snapped steel. He must have made a noise of some kind. Some grunt of shock. He found himself sitting very suddenly in the rubble. Trying to figure out what happened, trying to remember which way was up. Legs sprawled out in front of him, one of them very bent and mangled looking. One arm braced under him, the other still wrapped uselessly around his own gun.

And another, much uglier gun, pointed right at his face.

Shotgun. Sawn-off, with the evil grin of a raider sitting pretty behind it. Nick stared up at her blankly. He didn’t know if it was the shock or what, the confusion of one of his legs just suddenly vanishing out from under him, but he couldn’t make sense of the picture for a second. And then when he did, well. It was a bit too late, wasn’t it? Far too late to get his own gun up.

He heard the bang. A godawful bloom of noise in his ear. Gun going off point blank. 

But nothing hurt for a second. Nothing hurt for a _long_ second. His leg, sure, that was starting to send some messages up the wire, but nothing else. No shower of sparks and agony.

And then, belatedly, he realised that he hadn’t been the one shot. That the raider was crumpling in front of him. That there was a wall of heat at his back. That there was a _third_ gun, appearing in his peripheral vision. Pointing out across his shoulder. At the red mess that a couple seconds ago had been a raider’s face.

He looked up, dazed and crumpled, and found an avenging angel behind him. A small hand cannon held half like a gun and half like a club in her fist, a mask of icy fury on her face.

Nora. Or maybe Joan of goddamned Arc. Dang.

She stooped to one knee beside him, gun still up and tracking, and had an arm around his torso before his brain had even come back online. He made a noise, some sort of garbled questioning sound, and she ignored that too. She shifted her weight and heaved upwards, dragged him to his feet, most of his weight hanging off her. He only barely had time to scrabble at her, gun hand almost clocking her across the face, and she was already running. Well. Staggering. Flinging them both behind a slanted slab of concrete. Cover.

A couple more bullets smashed and spanged off the top of the slab half a second later. 50 calibre. Jesus _Christ_.

Nick sat there panting for a second. Just sat there. Not that he actually needed to breathe, or anything, but something in his chest felt like it was falling apart. He hunched over and made like the human in his memories for a second.

Shock, for the most part. Visions of narrowly-avoided mortality. _Mostly_ shock. 

She was crouched beside him when he managed to look up. Her brown eyes were wide and wild, the whites of them huge against her dark skin, stretching taut and tight over her face. He thought it was fury, for a second, the snarl still painting her lips, but then his eyes caught hers. Met them, properly, and held them. It wasn’t fury. It was _panic_.

“Shit, Nick!” she hissed, one hand grabbing for his mangled leg. “Shit, you okay?”

He blinked up at her. Stupidly. Absolutely vacantly. Like there was nothing in his skull at all. At his lack of an answer, she scrambled forward. All but crawled into his lap. Dropping her gun and fumbling for something in one of the pouches of her armour.

Stimpack, he realised. That was the pouch she kept her stimpacks in.

She thought one of those might help him.

He managed to boot himself back up. Finally. Managed to hold out his hands, managed to block her fumbling fingers. Stop her. Her head snapped up. She glared at him. He scrounged up a faltering, fumbling smile.

“I’m okay,” he said softly. Reassuringly, or as close as he could manage right now. “It’s all right, kid. I’m not going to be much use to you for the next couple of minutes, least till I can get that leg straightened out, but I’m okay. Honest. Don’t worry about it, okay? No need to go wasting one of those on me.”

He didn’t … He wasn’t sure _what_ sort of expression crossed her face then. What kind of a thing squalled across her features. But he was definitely minded of angels again. The biblical, apocalyptic kind. The hands of mercy, and the hands of vengeance.

“Will it help?” she asked quietly. Clipped and curt. A syringe appearing in her hand, held up in demonstration towards him. “Don’t talk to me about waste, Nick. Will it _help_?”

Nick … opened his mouth. Meant to answer. And then faltered again.

He didn’t _know_. Honestly. He didn’t know if it would help or not. He’d never tried. Mostly because logic would say that it wouldn’t, that a chem meant to knit flesh back together would do jack shit to a hunk of plastic and metal, but …

He didn’t know. Not for sure. And something in her face right now told him that he’d _better_ be sure, or she’d have other words to say to him.

So he shrugged, briefly, and surrendered.

“Don’t know, kid,” he said, slumping back a bit. “Honestly? I never tried. Don’t tend to carry them too much, and I mostly … Well. I kinda figured it’d be a bit pointless. You know?”

She _should_. Didn’t even need time together, should have been obvious right off the bat. A thing like him should have no use for things like that. He wasn’t a Gen 3 or anything. Might as well try to stimpack a car or a cash register while you were at it. Ask a sentry bot to pop a couple of pills. But her face turned mulish. Her face turned grim.

“Then I guess we’ll try it now,” she said, and he didn’t know what to do with the thickness of it. The half a wobble in the bottom of it. “You never know, Nick. Can’t hurt to try.”

And Nick wasn’t sure about that. He wasn’t sure at all. There weren’t a whole lot of things in the world that he thought couldn’t hurt you if pushed anymore. But he didn’t say anything. He let her line the needle up against his mangled hip, let her find a seam to jab it into. Kept still and silent through the odd rush of sensation as the liquid flowed into his false skin.

It didn’t … It weirdly seemed to help a bit. Numbed him or something. But he couldn’t tell if that was the stimpack, or the look on her face. The gentleness of her hands. 

She tucked the empty syringe back into her pouch. Scrubbed at her face a bit, wiped a shaking hand against her cheek. Like she was wiping away something, something he couldn’t see. Then she pressed her lips together, firmed her chin, and picked up her little hand cannon again. The one she’d pulled out of a power station north of the airport. She settled it, calm and deadly, in her hand.

“You stay here for a bit,” she said quietly. “Straighten the leg out. Maybe cover me if you can. I’m gonna see to that sniper, okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”

Nick stared at her helplessly. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, partner. Be careful.”

She smiled at him. A bleak, desperate, wobbly sort of thing. White teeth and bright despair. “Oh, don’t worry about me, Nick,” she said lightly. The most beautiful and vengeful angel in all of Hell. “I’m going to rain the wrath of God on his fucking head. You just stay here, okay? You stay safe, at least for five minutes. Then I’ll bring you a nice big gun, and do what I can for your leg, and we can have a talk about _wasting things_. Okay?”

He had to squash down his first answer to that. The urge, instinct, to soften it and play it off. Play along, hide behind an old, wry grin, make like she wasn’t …

He hadn’t meant to hurt her by it. The comment. Wasting things on him. He still wasn’t sure _how_ she’d been hurt by it, but she had been. He could see that. And that was his fault, that was something he’d done, so he could stand to sit and talk and try to fix it. That was fair. Okay.

“Anything you want, Nora,” he said quietly. “Anything. You just say the word.”

That expression crossed her face again. That squall of a thing, half fury and half tears, and something else as well. Something strange. Something he had no name for. She stared at him, caught short, like she didn’t know what to do with him or with anything like him. And then she …

She swooped down. Just the burst of motion beside him. And darted a quick, brief kiss to his cheek.

All Nick’s thoughts stopped. Every last one. 

“You’re an idiot, Detective Valentine,” she whispered. Thickly, like she was crying. “You’re a god damn _idiot_. I’m going to go kill some people now. Don’t get hurt until I get back, okay?”

He didn’t answer her. He _couldn’t have_. She was off and away a second later. Darting out of cover, dodging the bullet that smashed into the ground at her feet, kicking up concrete dust in her wake. Something in his chest lurched, but everything else was still … all white and empty around it. Blank as his brain. Light as a feather. 

He got to his feet. Mangled leg and all. Maybe it was the stimpack. Maybe it was something else. The kiss of a goddamn angel. Who could tell? He got to his feet and sent a few bullets of his own whistling out into the silence. Drawing fire. Giving cover. She’d asked for that. 

Something clipped the sleeve of his coat. Something spanged off rebar an inch from his face. He didn’t flinch. Honestly, he barely noticed. Someone yelled furiously above him. A valkyrie, an avenging angel. He found himself grinning fiercely. Shots sprayed around the sniper’s nest. 44 calibre, this time. Not 50. The wrath of God. 

A couple of seconds later, all was quiet. All was still. 

His knee creaked a bit. Quiet protest. A groan of bent metal and splintered struts. Diagnostic alerts poked at his awareness. But a liquid strength flowed through him. It held. It didn’t hurt.

When she scrambled down to meet him, all dismay and exasperated fury, a new sniper rifle over her shoulder, he just smiled soppily at her. Just beamed like the idiot he was. She muscled him back against the concrete. All but picked him up, and wasn’t that a thing? Wasn’t that a hell of a thing too. He let her. He’d have let her do anything in the universe.

“ _What did I say_ about getting hurt?” she growled. All fire and fury. Hands gentle at his hip. Light on his shaking metal struts. “Damn it, Nick!”

“It’s all right,” he said. Resting his hands on her shoulders. “I’m all right. I promise, Nora. I’m all right.”

Honestly, right that second, he couldn’t have been anything else.

She didn’t believe him. Not in the slightest. “Bullshit,” she said. Immediately. But she softened enough to smile at him. More rueful and exasperated than pleased, but he’d take what he could get. Her hands gentled further. Eased him back against the concrete slab. “Lucky for you, I’ve got more stimpacks. And some duct tape and pliers, too. What the one won’t fix, I’m sure the others can sort out, at least for a little bit. _Damn_ it, Nick.”

He laughed. A dazed little huff of a thing. But sure. One or the other. Something would work. In her hands, something had to.

“Thanks,” he said. Very softly, very quietly. As seriously as he’d ever said anything. “Thanks, Nora. Appreciate it.”

More than anything else in the world.

It started with a bullet. That thing, that strange thing of hers. Or his awareness of that thing of hers. That desire to help him. That warm, ferocious, unbending thing. He still didn’t know if stimpacks actually worked on Gen 2s. Or whatever stripe of prototype he was. He didn’t know if it was the chems that let him stand up every time she pressed one into his skin, every time she took something she needed and gave it to him instead. Or if it was something else. Some feeling, some far more abstract source of strength. 

Either way, though, the diagnostics said _something_ was working. Warm hands, and an avenging angel. The most beautiful angel in Hell. He kept standing. Every time.

It started with a bullet. Like so many things out here. And it was going to end with one, too. Because after all of that. The hands of mercy, and the hands of vengeance. 

After that, Nick wasn’t leaving for anything less.

**Author's Note:**

> Being able to stimpack Nick makes absolutely no sense at all, but every time we do he gives this quiet baffled little 'appreciate it' like he thought we were just going to leave him sitting there half blown to pieces, and I'm _really glad_ it somehow nonsensically works, and also I need to go blow up some raiders with a rocket launcher now.


End file.
